In the history of literature, several outstanding novels have captured the personal and societal challenges associated with upward mobility. Once a man could make his fortune through intrepid adventure (R.L. Stevenson), while a woman could do so by marrying the right man (Jane Austen). In the last 30 years, the “office novel” has charted how capitalism “plunders the sensuality of the body,” to quote the scholar Terry Eagleton. Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995), Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air (2001) and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) are some of the finest works of this subgenre.
To those worthy names I would add Mamta Kalia’s Daud (2000), recently translated into English by Jerry Pinto as Rat Race. A six-decade veteran of Hindi literature, Kalia was awarded the 2025 Sahitya Akademi award last month for her memoir, Jeete Jee Allahabad. Set in the late 1990s, Rat Race follows Pawan Pande, an enterprising youth from Allahabad who goes off to study at IIM-Ahmedabad and later to work at a private LPG firm. In 120-odd pages, we see how Pawan abandons his cosy family life and adopts the insular Way of the Yuppie, much to the chagrin of his parents. Through this gulf between their hopes and Pawan’s skyrocketing aspirations, Kalia paints a terrifying portrait of a newly liberalised India, caught between contradictory belief systems.
The first half of the novel focuses on Pawan and his largely male friends’ group, “boys who lived like princes at home” before throwing themselves head-first into corporate life, sacrificing food, sleep and familial relations. Kalia describes the everyday absurdities of their lives with humour and compassion—for example, their habit of calling every professional caterer in Ahmedabad “aunty”, regardless of whether the individual is 20, 40 or 60 years old. Or when Pawan makes a staggering 200-plus gas-connection bookings for his employers, Gurjar Gas, in one day. His hack? Convincing an influential godman to hire Gurjar Gas for his needs—and his devotees follow suit instantly. The episode underlines Kalia’s point about Indian society and capitalism in the 1990s. We didn’t really change our ways to fit the contours of the then-nascent corporate culture; instead, we demanded that the new capitalists make space for our eccentricities and insecurities.
In her short story Thodaa-Saa Pragatisheel (Slightly Progressive), Kalia wrote that educated young men in India dreamt of women who were “educated but submissive, modern but obedient, intelligent but not a free thinker” (my translation).
Rat Race demonstrates this principle through several female characters. Chief among them is Pawan’s girlfriend Stella, to whom he gets engaged at warp speed. Unsurprisingly, Pawan’s parents expect Stella to be skilled at cooking and housekeeping while still running her family business 24x7. There’s also Shilpa Kabra, Pawan’s colleague, who is considered “part of the gang” when it comes to after-work get-togethers. But behind her back, Pawan makes juvenile double entendres involving her last name. And then, there is Rajul, who is married to Pawan’s friend, Abhishek. Rajul does not want a child because her career is going really well. But she lets Abhishek talk her into a pregnancy shortly after their marriage. And like clockwork, her employers start giving her dead-end assignments, isolating her from her teammates until, inevitably, Rajul is forced to quit.
A novel like Rat Race rewards close reading for Kalia packs in subtle observations about different aspects of Indian society at the turn-of-the-millennium. For example, she highlights the casteist and elitist Indian condescension towards manual labour through the character of Saghan. When he starts learning hardware engineering (in addition to his software classes), his parents are aghast. Saghan tries to explain that in the West, expert hardware engineers are often paid vastly more than run-of-the-mill software foot soldiers. But his parents are unimpressed—in their little corner of the world, anyone wielding a soldering iron is automatically a mechanic.
Jerry Pinto’s fleet-footed translation strikes the right balance between pragmatism and whimsy. Rekha’s santaap (a feeling of grief or suffering) becomes “bitter vetch and gall” while her tilmilaana becomes her being “appalled”.
My favourite translation moment involves Rajul becoming upset at her husband for spending a lot of his time selecting attractive female models for his ad firm. In the original, Kalia has Rajul sarcastically quip, “Maze hain, tankhwah bhi milti hai, ladki bhi milti hai”. Pinto translates it as “Not a bad line of work if you can get it, you get a salary and you get the girls as well”—possibly a reference to the George and Ira Gershwin song Nice Work If You Can Get It.
The second half of the novel escalates the battle between Pawan, who grows increasingly aggressive in his devotion to work, and his parents, who grow desperate in their desire to have their son back in Allahabad. As I finished Rat Race, I was reminded of the line from Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (a novel Kalia has translated into Hindi): “You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity.”
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.